


love at the end of the war

by pr0serpina



Series: American Triptych [1]
Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Episode: s11e16 Goodbye Farewell and Amen, Epistolary, M/M, Mutual Pining, Unresolved Sexual Tension, it gets gayer and more polyamorous from here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-09-02 02:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16778029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pr0serpina/pseuds/pr0serpina
Summary: They push the last two beds in Uijeongbu together. “We’re the last people left on earth,” BJ quips.BJ leaves a lot unsaid because he's banking on their goodbye being temporary.  Hawkeye takes no such chances.





	love at the end of the war

They push the last two beds in Uijeongbu together. “We’re the last people left on earth,” BJ quips. His father-in-law was in the Great War and didn’t come home until February of 1919. By comparison, he’s a little dazzled at how fast things are moving now.

“Just you, me, and the cook,” Hawkeye agrees, flopping down a cot. He pours a lighter-fluid martini from the measuring beaker and hands it to BJ. “Last martinis in hell?”

“Not saving any for breakfast?”

“Oh, Beej.” Hawk grins. “Tomorrow we’ll have clubs in real airports, with real gin, made from actual juniper instead of licorice. No, let’s go out with a bang and drink it all now.”

“If we drink it all now, we might not make it to tomorrow.”

Hawk shrugs indolently. “There are no guarantees in life.”

BJ slides in next to him. They’re bare chested and in jockey shorts and it’s entirely too hot to share a bed, but it feels appropriate somehow, despite the complete and utter lack of appropriateness. He knows it’s not _his_ intention, but he may well never see Hawkeye again. More than once he’s thought of the 4077th’s first commander, shot down on _his_ way home. More often than he cares to admit, he’s thought of Hawk in a postwar world. Would he even want to see BJ, or would reminders of the war be too painful? Hawk is so resilient, but he’s fragile, too.

Hawkeye pokes him in the side. “I can hear you thinking. Thinking is taking a vacation right now. Anything goes _but_ thinking.”

“If driving fast cars you like, if low bars you like,” BJ sings.

“If me undressed you like, then nobody will oppose,” Hawkeye adds, waggling his eyebrows.

“You skipped a few lines there.”

“Just skipping to the good part.”

The unrelenting silence of the camp presses on BJ like a stone. It really is just them, the cook, and the cicadas. There is so much he wants to say. His palms are sweaty on the martini glass, and he downs the swill quickly. Liquid courage or liquid stupor. Either is fine.

Hawkeye’s eyes are big and liquid in the failing light. His hair falls across his forehead; he really needs a haircut, and BJ makes a note to himself to offer before they leave. His chest contracts as he studies how gray Hawk has gotten. His hair was so black when they first met. It’s so _unfair_ , the war has taken so much from them both. _God,_ but Hawk is pretty. He stretches without a shred of self-consciousness, elongating the lean lines of his body in a way that BJ watches shamelessly. Hawk catches his gaze and grins, glittering eyes narrowing to slits. “My eyes are up here, sailor.”

BJ clears his throat, blood rushing to his face. He doesn’t trust himself to answer, so he reaches for the gin beaker. “We could play chess,” he suggests after a long swallow.

Hawk is practically snickering at him. “Chess? Well, okay, if that’s what you want.”

Hawk has him checkmated so fast his head spins, but at least he gets a hold of himself.

They kill the rest of the gin, more subdued now. Every creak of the cots as they readjust themselves sounds like a car backfiring in the heavy, humid silence. They lay facing each other, legs tangled together but not touching otherwise. They’ve shared beds before—in bitter cold, in nightmares, and in hangovers—and it feels weird to have more room than one cot’s worth. BJ wants to touch him so badly that he feels it like an ache in his muscles. He wants to say something, but his mouth is so dry.

Hawkeye lifts his hand tentatively. “Can I…?”

BJ tugs Hawkeye to him in relief, wrapping his arms around Hawk tightly. Hawk buries his face in BJ’s chest. BJ sighs, relishing in the feel of Hawk. He strokes Hawk’s back, all lean muscle and bone (more bone than BJ would like, in his medical opinion). Hawkeye clings to him like a drowning man, muttering under his breath things that BJ knows he’s not really meant to hear. He brushes his lips against Hawk’s dove-gray head. “This isn’t the end, this isn’t the end.” He chants it like a litany, barely aware that he’s saying it out loud.

Hawk pulls away, and even though it’s eleventy-million degrees, BJ misses the contact. “Hey, you don’t have to tell me,” he jokes weakly.

BJ flinches. He can’t stand Hawkeye’s self-deprecation, his complete and seemingly unshakable belief that they won’t see each other again. “I think I _do,_ since it won’t penetrate your thick skull.”

“I have a certain appreciation for my skull. It’s kept me safe through many a knock.”

“I’ll knock _you_ if you don’t start believing me.”

Hawk gives him half a smile. “Ah, Beej. You know I’m all smoke and no substance.”

BJ settles for a long-suffering sigh. He wants to wallop Hawk for being so light at a time like this. Mostly he wants to kiss him more than he’s wanted anything in a long time. _Next time I see him_ , he promises himself. Here it would be too easy for Hawkeye to blame it on gin and victory. He keeps himself to kissing Hawkeye’s hair (nothing unusual here, folks; they’ve trod that line for months now) and holding him until he falls asleep.

He wiggles out of bed to leave Hawk the one and only message where he’ll use the word _goodbye._

* * *

BJ finds the letter in his duffel bag in Hawaii when he’s digging around for a toothbrush. He feels a weird pulling in his gut, especially because of the cryptic address on the envelope: _It’s up to you if you want to read this._ He knows Hawkeye’s handwriting as well as his own—cramped and slanting, with looping letters like a little kid’s. When had Hawk found time to write this? When he was in Guam on his rescinded trip home, maybe? Did he hide in the latrine?

> ~~Dear BJ~~ ~~To BJ~~ ~~Dear Bea and Jay, if that is your real name~~ My dear Beej.
> 
> If you’re reading this, it means I had the guts to hide it in your bag. I’m writing this because I know whatever I manage to say in person will be inadequate, probably insincere, and definitely said in the company of, well, the company. Did you know that when I went to Battalion Aid, I wrote my will? I didn’t leave you anything. Nothing I could think of leaving you was worth it. I did, however, leave something to Erin: a full list of every person whose life her daddy saved, as an explanation for why he had to be away from her for so long, so that she would know that it was not time wasted.

BJ’s eyes well up. _Oh, Hawk._

> What I want to say is this: I am so glad that I stole a jeep, went AWOL, and found you in Kimpo. I’m not glad that you were sentenced to this uniquely muddy, bloody purgatory. But I can’t bring myself to be sorry that I got to have you for this little while. (I am, as you know, an unrepentant creature.) You held me together and/or let me go to pieces.. Sometimes you made me so angry I wanted to shake you. But never did I regret you being here. And look, I know you have a complex about Trapper.

BJ scoffs. He does not have a _complex._ He has a very well-buried slight case of green jealousy that by all accounts, Trapper was funnier than he is. And that he got to Hawkeye first. But BJ doesn’t think about that.

> Was Trapper funnier in a class-clown, practical-joke way? Well, yeah. He probably was.

The _nerve._

> Your knack for wordplay was different than Marx Brothers skits but just as valued—more so, because with you, I never felt funnier or more clever. You were just the person I needed to keep me laughing through it all.
> 
> Thank you for sharing your family. You know it’s just me and Dad knocking around our too-big house like a bunch of dried beans, but I have no aptitude for children and apparently less aptitude for keeping people who will stay. I’m not being self-deprecating; you’re spotting a rare moment of honesty wherein I tell you how bad I am with other people. But without a second thought, you let me into your private world of letters, knitted socks, slightly stale cakes, first teeth, first words, first steps. I rejoiced in it all. I cannot tell you how much you and your family have meant to me, and I’ve already written Peggy to thank her. Through your letters, I feel like I’ve known her my whole life, so I mean it when I say how tremendously excited I am for you to finally see her again, to say nothing of your adorable daughter.
> 
> Beej, this is all beating about the bush, though it’s all true. What I want to say the very most, what I would give anything to have the courage to say in person (though as you can see, I lack the courage to say it in a letter) is this. I love you. I have loved you from Rudyard Kipling to vomiting after your first shift to calling Frank ‘Ferret Face.’ I have loved you from Androcles and the Lion to making goat sounds to get a child to drink his milk. I love you from your ridiculously oversized Chucks to your ridiculously oversized mustache.
> 
> I love you. That’s all I really wanted to say.
> 
> Yours,
> 
> Hawk

**Author's Note:**

> Oh hey, MASH fandom. First time writer, long time admirer. I didn't even know there was a MASH fandom because I deleted my tumblr in a fit of pique a year ago, so you cannot imagine my joy that there is a remarkably active fandom for a show that went off the air when my parents were in college. Y'all are the bee's knees and I'm thrilled to contribute.
> 
> Also, my bad if I play fast and loose with canon events. I've only seen the finale once and it reduced me to a blubbering wreck.


End file.
